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Sunday, April 7, 2013

NOW WE KNOW WHAT IT'S GOOD FOR! MARRY THE PLANET!

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"Michael Leunig is an Australian cartoonist, writer, painter, philosopher and poet. His commentary on political, cultural and emotional life spans more than forty years and has often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world. The fragile ecosystem of human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world is a related and recurrent theme": http://www.leunig.com.au/

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"Elizabeth Stephens is a performance artist, activist and educator whose art-work, performance art and writing have explored themes of queerness, feminism and environmentalism for over 25 years. Her current passion is SexEcology: the art of exploring the Earth as a lover. Stephens is creating this new field of research in collaboration with her partner Annie Sprinkle. Together they form the Love Art Laboratory where they are attempting to make the environmental movement a little more sexy, fun and diverse. Stephens is a professor of art at University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis": http://art.ucsc.edu/faculty/elizabeth-stephens The Love Art Laboratory site is here: http://anniesprinkle.org/projects/current-projects/love-art-laboratory/

===Tuesday, 9 April – Who sees which kinds of stories and why?
• read Merrick 1, 2 (& 3 if you can)

Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed – Irene will facilitate

=How does it shift feminist science interests in making nature and nurture mutually exclusive, opposites, or some kind of scale or proportion? What would Merrick say about it all do you think?

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER ONE:

Merrick: 1: "In other words, the secret feminist cabal is a joke. But a very serious joke. It is this particular understanding that makes the phrase so appropriate for my purposes. For, despite the seriousness of the issues at stake in this history, one of the most appealing yet overlooked aspects of sf feminisms is the humor and wit of its writers, critics, and fans. Science fiction may be a place where feminists go to dream of utopia or plot revolution, but it is also a source of pleasure -- of individual reading pleasure, of emotional connection with like-minded folk -- and at times a place to make life-long friends and allies."

Merrick: 10: "My reading of Joanna Russ's The Female Man in the 1990s, for example, provided a very different sense of the feminism of that time than did my readings of feminist history and theory, and brought the movement alive to me in a way no other text had done."

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER TWO:

Merrick: 35: "Whilst some sources estimate that ment meade up to 90 percent of the audience or magazines such as Astounding SF, the continual (re)construction of sf as a masculine domain has concealed women's interaction with sf, as readers, as authors, and as subjects represented through female characters."

Merrick: 61-2: "Certainly // the letters in Vertex suggest that [Philip K.] Dick's and [Jeffrey] Anderson's perceptions of Russ's 'anger,' 'militancy,' and charges of 'sexism' are derived from more than just this one article; perhaps influenced by personal interactions with Russ, her reviews of their work, or awareness of her fictional texts, such as 'When it Changed' or The Female Man."

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER THREE:

Merrick: 70: "As Haraway's quote suggest, imagination is a powerful element in collective political identity. In relation to sf there are resonances here with L. Timmel Duchamp's insight that entry into sf feminisms involves an imagining into community, even if only as an isolated reader in conversation with texts alone."

THINK WORLDING! THINK OF YOUR OWN ENTRY INTO SF FEMINISMS! THINK WHAT THE CON WHILEAWAY COULD BE FOR YOU, OUR CLASS, OUR FRIENDS!

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Click this pic to find a talk Katie gave on Star Trek Media Art in 2000. See what you think thirteen years later....

Katie’s office hours:Katie is often available for talk and concerns right after each class; her regular office hours are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm or at 4-6 pm. The SignIn Sheet tells you which it is this week. There is a calendar outside Katie's door that says so too. And you can see which it is on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Wednesday of the month Katie tries to have extended office hours from 2:30 to 5:30.

Katie’s social hours:these are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm, or at 4-6 pm, alternately with office hours. These too are noted on the calendar outside Katie's door as well as on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Tuesday of the month Katie shifts social hours to that day, from 5-7 pm. What are social hours? a time to drop by to talk to Katie and whoever else shows up, other students, both undergrad and grad, occasionally faculty and staff, or even folks in the area.

Conversations with Irene: these are also on Wednesdays, from 11-12. Irene Xue (email: ixue@terpmail.umd.edu ) is the teaching assistant for our class, who is offering her own drop in times for students to talk about feminisms, science fiction, second life, or anything else that comes up in class that you hope to learn more about, or just share more about. FLYER

Design Fiction

“How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called ‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.” (Bleecker 2009)

About Me

I am Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with interdisciplinary scholarship located at a juncture of feminist technoscience studies, intersectional digital cultures and media studies, and LGBT Studies. I have published two books, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. women's movements (Indiana, 1994) and Networked Reenactments: Stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell (Duke, 2011) and am now working on
Attaching, for Climate Change: a sympoiesis of media, and Demonstrations and Experiments: Quaker women at the origins of modern Science.